A Backward Glance, by Edith Wharton

Chapter 6

6.1.

The doing of “The Decoration of Houses” amused me very much, but can hardly be regarded as a part of
my literary career. That began with the publishing, in “Scribner’s Magazine,” of two or three short stories. The first
was called “Mrs. Manstey’s View,” the second “The Fullness of Life.” Both attracted attention, and gave me the pleasant
flutter incidental to first seeing one’s self in print; but they brought me no nearer to other workers in the same
field. I continued to live my old life, for my husband was as fond of society as ever, and I knew of no other
existence, except in our annual escapes to Italy. I had as yet no real personality of my own, and was not to acquire
one till my first volume of short stories was published — and that was not until 1899. This volume, called “The Greater
Inclination,” contained none of my earlier tales, all of which I had rejected as not worth reprinting. I had gone on
working hard at the nouvelle form, and the stories making up my first volume were chosen after protracted consultations
with Walter Berry, the friend who had shown me how to put “The Decoration of Houses” into shape. From that day until
his death, twenty-seven years later, through all his busy professional life, he followed each of my literary steps with
the same patient interest, and I doubt if a beginner in the art ever had a sterner yet more stimulating guide.

And now the incredible had happened! Out of the Pelion and Ossa of slowly accumulating manuscripts, plays, novels
and dramas, had blossomed a little volume of stories — stories which editors had wanted for their magazines, and a
publisher now actually wanted for a volume! I had been astonished enough to see the stories in print, but the idea that
they might in the course of time be collected in a book never occurred to me till Mr. Brownell transmitted the Scribner
proposal.

I had written short stories that were thought worthy of preservation! Was it the same insignificant
I that I had always known? Any one walking along the streets might go into any bookshop, and say: “Please give
me Edith Wharton’s book,” and the clerk, without bursting into incredulous laughter, would produce it, and be paid for
it, and the purchaser would walk home with it and read it, and talk of it, and pass it on to other people to read! The
whole business seemed too unreal to be anything but a practical joke played on me by some occult humourist; and my
friends could not have been more astonished and incredulous than I was. I opened the first notices of the book with
trembling hands and a suffocated heart. What I had done was actually thought important enough to be not only printed
but reviewed! With a sense of mingled guilt and self-satisfaction I glanced at one article after another. They were
unbelievably kind, but for the most part their praise only humbled me; and often I found it bewildering. But at length
I came on a notice which suddenly stiffened my limp spine. “When Mrs. Wharton,” the condescending critic wrote, “has
learned the rudiments of her art, she will know that a short story should always begin with dialogue.”

“ALWAYS”? I rubbed my eyes. Here was a professional critic who seemed to think that works of art should be produced
by rule of thumb, that there could be a fixed formula for the design of every short story ever written or to be
written! Even I already knew that this was ridiculous. I had never consciously formulated the principles of my craft,
but during my years of experimenting I had pondered on them deeply, and this egregious commentary did me the immense
service of giving my ponderings an axiomatic form. Every short story, I now saw, like every other work of art, contains
within itself the germ of its own particular form and dimensions, and ab ovo is the artist’s only rule. In an instant I
was free forever from the bogey of the omniscient reviewer, and though I was always interested in what was said of my
books, and sometimes (though rarely) helped by the comments of the professional critics, never did they influence me
against my judgment, or deflect me by a hair’s-breadth from what I knew to be “the real right” way.

In this I was much helped by Walter Berry. No critic was ever severer, but none had more respect for the artist’s
liberty. He taught me never to be satisfied with my own work, but never to let my inward conviction as to the rightness
of anything I had done be affected by outside opinion. I remember, after writing the first chapters of “The Valley of
Decision,” which I had begun in a burst of lyric rapture and didn’t know how to go on with, confessing to him my
difficulty and my discouragement. He looked through what I had written, handed it back, and said simply: “Don’t worry
about how you’re to go on. Just write down everything you feel like telling.” The advice freed me once for all from the
incubus of an artificially pre-designed plan, and sent me rushing ahead with my tale, letting each incident create the
next, and keeping in sight only the novelist’s essential sign-post; the inner significance of the “case” selected. Yet
when the novel was done, I remember how meticulously he studied it from the point of view of language, marking down
faulty syntax and false metaphors, smiling away over-emphasis and unnecessary repetitions, helping me patiently through
the beginner’s verbal perplexities, yet never laying hands on what he considered sacred: the SOUL of the novel, which
is (or should be) the writer’s own soul.

I suppose there is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved,
but an expansion, an interpretation, of one’s self, the very meaning of one’s soul. Such a friend I found in Walter
Berry, and though the chances of life then separated us, and later his successful professional career, first in
Washington, afterward as one of the Judges of the International Tribunal in Cairo, for long years put frequent
intervals between our meetings, yet whenever we did meet the same deep understanding drew us together. That
understanding lasted as long as my friend lived; and no words can say, because such things are unsayable, how the
influence of his thought, his character, his deepest personality, were interwoven with mine.

He alone not only encouraged me to write, as others had already done, but had the patience and the intelligence to
teach me how. Others praised, some flattered — he alone took the trouble to analyze and criticize. The instinct to
write had always been there; it was he who drew it forth, shaped it and set it free. From my first volume of short
stories to “Twilight Sleep,” the novel I published just before his death, nothing in my work escaped him, no detail was
too trifling to be examined and discussed, gently ridiculed or quietly praised. He never overlooked a defect, and there
were times when his silence had the weight of a page of censure; yet I never remember to have been disheartened by it,
for he had so deep a respect for the artist’s liberty that he never sought to restrict my imagination or to check its
flight. His invariable rule, though he prized above all things concision and austerity, was to encourage me to write as
my own instinct impelled me; and it was only after the story or the book was done that we set out together on the
“adjective hunts” from which we often brought back such heavy bags.

Once I had found my footing and had my material in hand, his criticisms became increasingly searching. With each
book he exacted a higher standard in economy of expression, in purity of language, in the avoidance of the hackneyed
and the precious. Sometimes I was not able to show him a novel before publication, and in that case he confined himself
to friendly generalities, often helping me to avoid, in my next book, the faults he gently hinted at. When he could
follow my work in manuscript he left no detail unnoticed; but though I sometimes caught a faint smile over a situation
which he did not see from my angle, or a point of view he did not share, his only care was to help me do better
whatever I had set out to do.

But perhaps our long, our ever-recurring talks about the masters of fiction, helped me even more than his advice. I
had never known any one so instantly and unerringly moved by all that was finest in literature. His praise of great
work was like a trumpet-call. I never heard it without discovering new beauties in the work he praised; he was one of
those commentators who unseal one’s eyes. I remember his once saying to me, when I was very young: “It is easy to see
superficial resemblances between things. It takes a first-rate mind to perceive the differences underneath.” Nothing
has ever sharpened my own critical sense as much as that.

The comrade that he was to me in my work, he was also in the enjoyment of all things beautiful, stirring and
exalting. He was tireless in his appreciation of beauty — beauty of architecture, of painting, of landscape. Whatever I
saw with him, in the many lands we wandered through, I saw with a keenness doubled by his, and studied afterward with
an ardour with which his always kept pace. To the end, through prolonged ill-health and the bitter consciousness of
failing powers, his soul still struggled out to beauty; and I remember that, summoned to him at the first attack of his
fatal illness, I found him lying speechless, motionless and barely able to look up, but yet able to whisper, as he
recognized me: “Bamberg — in the hall.” After a moment’s bewilderment I guessed that he must be speaking of a new book
— there was not a day when they did not pour in to his admirably chosen and ever-growing library; and going out into
the hall I found a newly published quarto on the sculptures of Bamberg cathedral, which he had received only the day
before. I brought it to him, and as I sat beside him with the open volume he whispered one by one the names of the most
beautiful statues, and signed to me to hold the book up so that he could see them.

During his arduous professional life we had met only at long intervals; but when ill-health obliged him to resign
from the International Tribunal of Cairo he came to live in Paris, and after that we were more often together. During
all his working years, frequently interrupted by months of serious illness, he had managed to find time to read my
manuscripts and send me long letters of criticism and encouragement; but from the time when he came to Paris, where I
was then living, he was able to follow my work more closely, and his reading of each chapter as it was written and the
listening to his comments as he read, gave fresh life to my writing.

Another joy was the discovering of the newest and most worthwhile books, and the talking them over together. He was
a good linguist, and one of the most insatiable readers I have ever known; in science, history, biography, travels,
archaeological explorations, and the newest books on art and letters, little of real value escaped him. But best of all
(when he could be induced to do it) was his reading of poetry; a reading wholly different from Henry James’s, a thing
apart, and unforgettable, more reticent, less emphatic, yet equally sensitive and moving.

I cannot picture what the life of the spirit would have been to me without him. He found time when my mind and soul
were hungry and thirsty, and he fed them till our last hour together. It is such comradeships, made of seeing and
dreaming, and thinking and laughing together, that make one feel that for those who have shared them there can be no
parting.

But I must return to “The Greater Inclination,” and to my discovery of that soul of mine which the publication of my
first volume called to life. At last I had groped my way through to my vocation, and thereafter I never questioned that
story-telling was my job, though I doubted whether I should be able to cross the chasm which separated the nouvelle
from the novel. Meanwhile I felt like some homeless waif who, after trying for years to take out naturalization papers,
and being rejected by every country, has finally acquired a nationality. The Land of Letters was henceforth to be my
country, and I gloried in my new citizenship.

I remember once saying that I was a failure in Boston (where we used to go to stay with my husband’s family) because
they thought I was too fashionable to be intelligent, and a failure in New York because they were afraid I was too
intelligent to be fashionable. An amusing instance of this point of view happened not long after my first book had come
out, at a moment, that is, when I probably seemed to my New York friends at once more formidable and less “smart” than
before I had appeared in print. I met a girlfriend, herself the epitome of all “smartness,” who told me that one of New
York’s most fashionable hostesses had, rather apologetically, invited her to dine “with a few people who write.” “It
will be rather Bohemian, I’m afraid,” the inviter added, “but they say one ought to see something of those people. I
hope you won’t mind coming to help me out?” My young friend, who knew something of Paris and London society, was
delighted at an innovation which promised to take us out of the New York rut, and so was I, for it chanced that I had
been invited for the same evening. “Oh, what fun! Who do you suppose they’ll be?” I exulted, racking my brains to guess
how our hostess, who was my cousin, could have made the acquaintance of the very people I was still vainly longing to
know. The evening came, we assembled in the ornate drawing-room (one of those from which “The Decoration of Houses” had
not cleared a single gewgaw!) and I discovered that the Bohemians were my old friend Eliot Gregory, most popular of New
York diners-out (but who had the audacity to write an occasional article in a review or daily paper), George Smalley,
the New York correspondent of the London “Times” — and myself! To emphasize our common peculiarity we were seated
together, slightly below the salt, while up and down the rest of the long table the tiara-ed heads and bulging white
waistcoats of the most accredited millionaires glittered between gold plate and orchids. Such was Fifth Avenue’s first
glimpse of Bohemia, as personified by myself and two old friends!

I have often wondered, in looking back at the slow stammering beginnings of my literary life, whether or not it is a
good thing for the creative artist to grow up in an atmosphere where the arts are simply non-existent. Violent
opposition might be a stimulus — but was it helpful or the reverse to have every aspiration ignored, or looked at
askance? I have thought over this many times, as I have over most problems of creative art, in the fascinating but
probably idle attempt to discover HOW IT IS ALL DONE, and exactly what happens at that “fine point of the soul” where
the creative act, like the mystic’s union with the Unknowable, really seems to take place. And as I have grown older my
point of view has necessarily changed, since I have seen more and more would-be creators, whether in painting, music or
letters, whose way has been made smooth from the cradle, geniuses whose families were prostrate before them before they
had written a line or composed a measure, and who, in middle age, still sat in ineffectual ecstasy before the blank
page or the empty canvas; while, on the other hand, more and more of the baffled, the derided or the ignored have
fought their way to achievement. The conclusion is that I am no believer in pampered vocations, and that Schopenhauer’s
“Was Einer ist” seems to me the gist of the matter. But as regards a case like my own, where a development no doubt
naturally slow was certainly retarded by the indifference of every one about me, it is hard to say whether or no I was
really hindered. I am inclined to think the drawbacks were outweighed by the advantages; chief among these being the
fact that I escaped all premature flattery, all local celebrity, that I had to fight my way to expression through a
thick fog of indifference, if not of tacit disapproval, and that when at last I met one or two kindred minds their
criticisms were to me as sharp and searching as if they had been professionals in the exercise of their calling.
Fortunately the fact that they were personal friends did not affect their judgment, and my craft was held in such small
account in the only world I knew that I was always able to take the severest criticism without undue sensitiveness, and
not unusually to profit by it. The criticism I have in mind is that given in the course of private talk, and not
imparted by the reviews. I have no quarrel with the professional critics, who have often praised me beyond my merits;
but the man who has to review fifty books a week, often on a great variety of subjects, can hardly deal as
satisfactorily with any one of them as the friend talking over a book with a friend, and I have always found this kind
of comment the most helpful.

6.2.

The publishing of “The Greater Inclination” broke the chains which had held me so long in a kind of torpor. For
nearly twelve years I had tried to adjust myself to the life I had led since my marriage; but now I was overmastered by
the longing to meet people who shared my interests. I had found two delightful friends, who had helped to educate me
and to widen my interests; but one was a busy lawyer who did not live in New York, and who, as his practice grew, had
less and less leisure; while the other, a man many years older than myself, and of very worldly tastes, could not
understand my longing to break away from the world of fashion and be with my own spiritual kin. What I wanted above all
was to get to know other writers, to be welcomed among people who lived for the things I had always secretly lived for.
I knew only one novelist, Paul Bourget, one of the most stimulating and cultivated intelligences I have ever met, and
perhaps the most brilliant talker I have known; but we saw each other for only two or three weeks in the year, and he
too was always rebuking me for my apathy in continuing a life of wearisome frivolity, and telling me that at the
formative stage of my career I ought to be with people who were thinking and creating. Egerton Winthrop was too
generous not to come round also to this view, and in the end it was he who urged my husband to go to London with me for
a few weeks every year, so that I might at least meet a few men of letters, and have a taste of an old society in which
the various elements had been fused for generations.

These arguments prevailed, and we went to London the year that “The Greater Inclination” appeared. Shortly after our
arrival a friend gave me the address of James Bain, the well-known bookseller, and one day I dropped in at his shop to
ask what interesting new books there were. In reply Mr. Bain handed me my own little volume, with the remark: “This is
what everybody in London is talking about just now.” As Mr. Bain had no idea who I was, his astonishment on learning my
identity was as great as mine when he tried to sell me my own first-born as the book of the day! I should have enjoyed
intensely following up this first glimpse of success; but my husband was bored in London, where he would have been
amused only among the sporting set, while I wanted to know the writers. It is always depressing to live with the
dissatisfied, and my powers of enjoyment are so varied that when I was young I did not find it hard to adapt myself to
the preferences of any one I was fond of. The people about me were so indifferent to everything I really cared for that
complying with the tastes of others had become a habit, and it was only some years later, when I had written several
books, that I finally rebelled, and pleaded for the right to something better. Meanwhile we soon left London to take up
again the Italian wanderings which we both enjoyed, and out of which, in 1904, “The Valley of Decision” was to
grow.

Before this happened, another change had come. We sold our Newport house, and built one near Lenox, in the hills of
western Massachusetts, and at last I escaped from watering-place trivialities to the real country. If I could have made
the change sooner I dare say I should never have given a thought to the literary delights of Paris or London; for life
in the country is the only state which has always completely satisfied me, and I had never been allowed to gratify it,
even for a few weeks at a time. Now I was to know the joys of six or seven months a year among fields and woods of my
own, and the childish ecstasy of that first spring outing at Mamaroneck swept away all restlessness in the deep joy of
communion with the earth. On a slope overlooking the dark waters and densely wooded shores of Laurel Lake we built a
spacious and dignified house, to which we gave the name of my great-grandfather’s place, the Mount. There was a big
kitchen-garden with a grape pergola, a little farm, and a flower-garden outspread below the wide terrace overlooking
the lake. There for over ten years I lived and gardened and wrote contentedly, and should doubtless have ended my days
there had not a grave change in my husband’s health made the burden of the property too heavy. But meanwhile the Mount
was to give me country cares and joys, long happy rides and drives through the wooded lanes of that loveliest region,
the companionship of a few dear friends, and the freedom from trivial obligations which was necessary if I was to go on
with my writing. The Mount was my first real home, and though it is nearly twenty years since I last saw it (for I was
too happy there ever to want to revisit it as a stranger) its blessed influence still lives in me.

The country quiet stimulated my creative zeal; and since the publication of “The Greater Inclination” I was
naturally in the first fever of authorship. A year later, in 1900, I brought out my earliest attempt at a novel — a
long tale, rather — and the year after, a second collection of short stories, under the title of “Crucial Instances.”
The long tale, which was called “The Touchstone” — a quiet title carefully chosen for one of the quietest of my stories
— had little success in America. John Lane bought the English rights, and thinking the title too colourless he renamed
the book (naturally taking care not to consult me!) “A Gift from the Grave.” This seductive but misleading label must
have been exactly to the taste of the sentimental novel-reader of the day, for to my mingled wrath and amusement the
book sold rapidly in England, and I have often chuckled to think how defrauded the purchasers must have felt themselves
after reading the first few pages.

My short stories had attracted the attention denied to “the Touchstone,” and I think it was in reference to a tale
in “Crucial Instances” that I received what is surely one of the tersest and most vigorous letters ever penned by an
amateur critic. “Dear Madam,” my unknown correspondent wrote, “have you never known a respectable woman? If you have,
in the name of decency write about her!” It seems a long way from that comminatory cry to the point of view of the
critic who, referring the other day to the republication (in an anthology of ghost stories) of one of my tales, “The
Lady’s Maid’s Bell,” scathingly said it was hard to believe that a ghost created by so refined a writer as Mrs. Wharton
would do anything so gross as to ring a bell! My career began in the days when Thomas Hardy, in order to bring out
“Jude the Obscure” in a leading New York periodical, was compelled to turn the children of Jude and Sue into adopted
orphans; when the most popular young people’s magazine in America excluded all stories containing any reference to
“religion, love, politics, alcohol or fairies” (this is textual); the days when a well-known New York editor, offering
me a large sum for the serial rights of a projected novel, stipulated only that no reference to “an unlawful
attachment” should figure in it; when Theodore Roosevelt gently rebuked me for not having caused the reigning Duke of
Pianura (in “The Valley of Decision”) to make an honest woman of the humble bookseller’s daughter who loved him; and
when the translator of Dante, my beloved friend, Professor Charles Eliot Norton, hearing (after the appearance of “The
House of Mirth”) that I was preparing another “society” novel, wrote in alarm imploring me to remember that “no great
work of the imagination has ever been based on illicit passion!”

The poor novelists who were my contemporaries (in English-speaking countries) had to fight hard for the right to
turn the wooden dolls about which they were expected to make believe into struggling suffering human beings; but we
have been avenged, and more than avenged, not only by life but by the novelists, and I hope the latter will see before
long that it is as hard to get dramatic interest out of a mob of irresponsible criminals as out of the Puritan
marionettes who formed our stock-in-trade. Authentic human nature lies somewhere between the two, and is always there
for a new great novelist to rediscover.

The amusing thing about this turn of the wheel is that we who fought the good fight are now jeered at as the prigs
and prudes who barred the way to complete expression — as perhaps we should have tried to do, had we known it was to
cause creative art to be abandoned for pathology! But I must return to the reigning Duke of Pianura, who about this
time was more real to me than most of the people I talked and walked with in my daily life.

I have often been asked whether the writing of “The Valley of Decision” was not preceded by months of hard study. I
had never studied hard in my life, and it was far too late to learn how when I began to write “The Valley of Decision”;
but whenever I make this reply it is received with polite incredulity. The truth is that I have always found it hard to
explain that gradual absorption into my pores of a myriad details — details of landscape, architecture, old furniture
and eighteenth century portraits, the gossip of contemporary diarists and travellers, all vivified by repeated spring
wanderings guided by Goethe and the Chevalier de Brosses, by Goldoni and Gozzi, Arthur Young, Dr. Burney and Ippolito
Nievo, out of which the tale grew. I did not travel and look and read with the writing of the book in mind; but my
years of intimacy with the Italian eighteenth century gradually and imperceptibly fashioned the tale and compelled me
to write it; and whatever its faults — and they are many — it is saturated with the atmosphere I had so long lived
in.

Professor Norton, who had by this time become one of my great friends, followed the development of the tale with
interest, and helped it on by one of the most graceful gestes ever made by a distinguished scholar to a beginner. I
happened to tell him that, though I had been picking up second-hand books on eighteenth century Italy whenever I could
find them (hardly any of the classics of the period being then reprinted), there were a few that I had been unable to
buy, and one or two that even the public libraries could not supply. Among these were the original (French) version of
Goldoni’s memoirs, and the memoirs of Lorenzo da Ponte, published in Boston (of all places!) about 1824. A few weeks
later there came to the Mount a box containing these unattainable treasures, and many other books, almost as rare, from
the great library of travels at Shady Hill. For a whole summer these extremely valuable books, some quite
irreplaceable, were left at the disposal of a young scribbler who was just starting on her first novel — and to Charles
Norton it seemed perfectly natural, and almost an obligation, to hold out such help to a beginner.

The year after the publication of “The Valley of Decision” the “Century Magazine” asked me, to my great delight, to
write the text for a series of water-colours of Italian villas by Mr. Maxfield Parrish. The suggestion had originated
in the unexpected popularity of “The Decoration of Houses,” and also of “The Valley of Decision,” which was now
rewarding me for the long months of toil and perplexity I had undergone in writing it. I was only beginning to be known
as a novelist, but on Italian seventeenth and eighteenth century architecture, about which so little had been written,
I was thought to be fairly competent.

Armed with this commission I set out with my husband for Rome in the winter of 1903, and began my work in all
seriousness.

6.3.

Before telling the story of “Italian Villas” I must speak of the friend whose kindness made its writing possible.
Several years earlier, on starting on our annual pilgrimage to Italy, I had taken with me a letter from Paul Bourget to
Vernon Lee (Miss Violet Paget), the author of “Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy,” “Belcaro” and “Euphorion,”
three of my best-loved companions of the road. Bourget warned me that, though Miss Paget was an old friend of his, he
could not promise that his introduction would be of any use, as her time was so much taken up by her invalid
half-brother, Eugene Lee–Hamilton, who lived with her, that she saw very few people, and those only among her
intimates. It was therefore with little hope of success that I drove out from Florence to Il Palmerino, the long low
villa on the hillside of San Domenico where Miss Paget has so long made her home. I left Bourget’s letter, took a
yearning look at the primrose-yellow house-front and the homely box-scented garden, and drove away with no expectation
of ever seeing them again. But the next day Miss Paget wrote that, though her brother’s illness prevented her receiving
visitors, yet if I chanced to be the Edith Wharton who had written a certain sonnet (I forget its name) which had
attracted his attention in “Scribner’s Magazine,” she begged me to come as soon as possible, as he wished to make my
acquaintance. Luckily I WAS the author of the sonnet, and I hastened back to Il Palmerino, where I was affectionately
welcomed by its mistress, and led to the darkened room where her brother lay on the mattress that seemed so likely to
be a grave.

Eugene Lee–Hamilton, who was then a middle-aged man. Had been one of Lord Lyons’s secretaries of Embassy in Paris
during the Franco–Prussian war. The long period of over-strain and over-work, followed by the privations and horrors of
the siege of Paris, had brought about a bad nervous breakdown, of a kind which the doctors of that day had not learned
to deal with. Lee–Hamilton, his career cut short, lapsed into what seemed hopeless invalidism, and for years had lain
motionless on the mattress on which I first saw him. By that time he had grown so weak that he could see only an
occasional visitor, and for a very few moments. He was one of the most amusing talkers and raconteurs I have ever
known, and a great lover of letters, and especially of poetry; but when I first met him he could neither read nor
write, and was in such a state of weakness that his sister could only read a few lines to him at a time. These brief
readings were usually chosen among the poets, and his literary curiosity had remained so alert that, in addition to the
classics, he kept up with the new poets, even with those who had figured only in the reviews. It was in the course of
these explorations that he happened on the sonnet which did me the great good turn of bringing me into contact with two
of the most brilliant minds I have ever met.

His long years of suffering and helplessness had made Eugene Lee–Hamilton himself into a poet, and I have never
understood why the poignant verse written during his illness, and published in a volume called “Sonnets of the Wingless
Hours,” is not more widely known. I was proud to have any verse of mine praised by a poet of such quality, and I look
back gratefully to the moments spent at his bedside, talking of the things of the spirit.

To lighten the gloom of the picture I must add that a few years later he rose miraculously from his mattress,
learned again to walk, to write, and finally to ride a bicycle, and not long afterward came to America, where he paid
us a visit to Land’s End, rejoicing in his recovered vigour, and keeping us and our guests in shouts of laughter by his
high spirits and inimitable stories. I have often wished that the after-death resurrection, if it comes to us, might
resemble the recovery of lost youth which made Lee–Hamilton’s return to life so exhilarating to all about him.

Thanks to him, my acquaintance with his sister had grown into a friendship which has never flagged, though we are so
seldom together. Hitherto all my intellectual friendships had been with men, and Vernon Lee was the first highly
cultivated and brilliant woman I had ever known. I stood a little in awe of her, as I always did in the presence of
intellectual superiority, and liked best to sit silent and listen to a conversation which I still think almost the best
of its day. I have been fortunate in knowing intimately some great talkers among men, but I have met only three women
who had the real gift. They were Vernon Lee, Matilde Serao, the Neapolitan journalist and novelist, and the French
poetess, the Comtesse de Noailles. It is hard to establish any comparison between beings so unlike in race, traditions
and culture — but one might suggest the difference by saying that Matilde Serao’s talk was like the noonday glow of her
own Mediterranean, while Vernon Lee’s has the opalescent play of a northerly sky, and Madame de Noailles’ resembled the
most expensive fireworks.

No one welcomed “The Valley of Decision” more warmly than Vernon Lee, and it was a great encouragement to be praised
by a writer whom I so much admired, and who was so unquestioned an authority on the country and the period I had dealt
with. A year or two later the editor of the “Nuova Antologia,” then the leading Italian literary review, proposed to me
to bring out an Italian translation of my novel, and Vernon Lee at once offered to write the introduction. For a reason
I was never able to fathom (probably owing to a change in the administration of the review), the translation never
appeared; but Vernon Lee’s admirable preface is in my possession, and I still hope it may serve to introduce Italian
readers to my book.

These years were perhaps the happiest I was to know as regards literary hopes and achievements. My long
experimenting had resulted in two or three books which brought me more encouragement than I had ever dreamed of
obtaining, and were the means of my making some of the happiest friendships of my life. The reception of my books gave
me the self-confidence I had so long lacked, and in the company of people who shared my tastes, and treated me as their
equal, I ceased to suffer from the agonizing shyness which used to rob such encounters of all pleasure. It was in this
mood that I arrived in Italy in 1903, and turned to Vernon Lee for help in preparing my new book.

Always generous to younger writers, she was doubly so to me because of my friendship with her brother, and of her
interest in the task I had undertaken. At that time little had been written on Italian villa and garden architecture,
and only the most famous country-seats, mostly royal or princely, had been photographed and studied. As, in “The
Decoration of Houses,” Ogden Codman and I had purposely excluded palaces and royal chateaux from our list, and directed
the attention of our readers to the study of small and simple houses, so I wished that my new book should make known
the simpler and less familiar type of villa. At Frascati, for instance, I passed hurriedly over the familiar splendours
of Falconieri and Mondragone in order to give more space to the lovely Muti gardens, which at that time were almost
unknown; and wherever I went I followed the same plan. At first I found it difficult to get helpful information from
Italians, even from those living on the spot; a “garden” to them still meant a humpy lawn with oval beds of cannas
encircling a banana-plant, and I wasted a good deal of time before learning that I must ask for “giardini tagliati,”
and not be discouraged by the usual reply: “Oh, you mean the old-fashioned garden with clipped shrubs? Well, we believe
there IS one at the Villa So-and-so — but what can you find in that to interest you?”

Vernon Lee’s long familiarity with the Italian country-side, and the wide circle of her Italian friendships, made it
easy for her to guide me to the right places, and put me in relation with people who could enable me to visit them. She
herself took me to nearly all the villas I wished to visit near Florence, and it was thanks to her recommendation that
wherever I went, from the Lakes to the Roman Campagna, I found open doors and a helpful hospitality.

Among the friendships then made I should like to record with particular gratitude that of the Countess Papafava of
Padua, from whom I first heard of the fantastic Castle of Cattajo, and through whose kindness the intricately lovely
gardens of Val San Zibio were opened to me; of Don Guido Cagnola of Varese, an authority on Italian villa architecture,
and himself the owner of La Gazzada, the beautiful villa near Varese of which there is a painting by Canaletto in the
Brera; of the Countess Rasponi, who lived in the noble villa of Font’allerta, above Florence, and supplemented Vernon
Lee in guiding me among the Florentine and Sienese villas; of the great Enrico Boito, whose powerful protection opened
the doors of some little-known villas of the Brianza and the Naviglio; and lastly of Countess Rasponi’s sister, my old
friend the Countess Maria Pasolini of Rome and Ravenna, great lover of seventeenth and eighteenth century architecture,
and an indefatigable guide in such a search as I was making. I have named them all here, because, although with the
exception of the Countess Rasponi and Boito they are still alive, and I now and then have the pleasure of seeing them,
I feel that I have never properly expressed my appreciation of their helpfulness. Their intelligent collaboration gave
“Italian Villas” its chief value, and I like to recall the joy I had in making the book by naming the friends who
helped me.

The day of the motor was not yet, and in addition to the difficulty of discovering the type of villa I was in search
of there remained the problem of how to get to it when found. I never enjoyed any work more than the preparing of that
book, but neither do I remember any task so associated with physical fatigue. Most of the places I wished to visit were
far from the principal railway lines, and could be reached only by a combination of slow trains and broken-down horse
conveyances, and we seemed to be always either rushing through the villas in order not to miss our train, or else, the
villas exhaustively inspected, kicking our heels for hours in some musty railway-station. I remember that once, after a
particularly fatiguing day, we were waiting at the Pavia station to catch a crowded express back to Milan. We had taken
the tea-basket, but there was no time for tea till we reached the station. There, feeling on the verge of inanition, I
started to brew it, in spite of my husband’s protests; but just as I filled our cups the express roared into the
station, and we had to leap on board and force our way into a crowded compartment carrying the basket, the plates and
the brimming cups! How we accomplished this I cannot imagine; but we did, to the astonishment and indignation of our
fellow travellers.

I have said there were no motors in 1903; but as a toy of the rich they were beginning to appear, and my old friend
George Meyer, then American Ambassador in Rome, was the owner of a magnificent specimen. Knowing that I wished to visit
the Villa Caprarola, now familiar to every sight-seer, but then visible only to the privileged, he suggested taking me
there in his car. I had never been in a motor before, and could hardly believe that we were to do the run to Caprarola
and back (fifty miles each way) in an afternoon, and still have time to inspect the villa and gardens; but we did — we
did with a vengeance! The car was probably the most luxurious, and certainly one of the fastest, then procurable; but
that meant only a sort of high-perched phaeton without hood or screen, or any protection from the wind. My husband was
put behind with the chauffeur, while I had the high seat like a coachman’s box beside the Ambassador. In a thin spring
dress, a sailor hat balanced on my chignon, and a two-inch tulle veil over my nose, I climbed proudly to my perch, and
off we tore across the Campagna, over humps and bumps, through ditches and across gutters, wind-swept, dust-enveloped,
I clinging to my sailor-hat, and George Meyer (luckily) to the wheel. We did the run in an hour, and I was able to see
the villa and gardens fairly well before we tore back to Rome, in time for a big dinner to which he and we happened to
be going. It was great fun doing the Witch of Atlas, and blissful not to have to worry about tired horses or
inconvenient trains; but when I reached the dinner my voice was entirely gone, and I spent the next days in bed,
fighting an acute laryngitis. In spite of this I swore then and there that as soon as I could make money enough I would
buy a motor; and so I did — and having a delicate throat, scoured the country in the hottest weather swaddled in a
stifling hood with a mica window, till some benefactor of the race invented the wind-screen and made motoring an
unmixed joy.

Meanwhile my first article had appeared in the “Century,” illustrated by a number of photographs, and by one of
Maxfield Parrish’s brilliant idealisations of the Italian scene. Thanks to the latter, the article attracted much
attention, but a note of warning soon came to me in the form of a distracted letter from the editor of the “Century,”
Richard Watson Gilder, an old friend and a country neighbour in the Berkshires. It appeared that in the editorial
offices of the “Century” Mr. Parrish’s fairy-tale pictures were justly admired, but it was agreed that the accompanying
text was too dry and technical. Would I not, Mr. Gilder pleaded, introduce into the next number a few anecdotes, and a
touch of human interest?

I am afraid my answer was curt. I had prepared for my task conscientiously; I knew that, at least in English, there
was no serious work on Italian villa and garden architecture, and I meant, as far as I was able, to fill the want. I
wrote back that if the “Century” wanted a series of sentimental and anecdotic commentaries on Mr. Parrish’s
illustrations, I was surprised that one of the authors of “The Decoration of Houses” should have been commissioned to
write them. But I added that if, on reflection, my articles were thought unsuitable to the illustrations (as they
certainly were!) I was quite willing to annul my contract. This was not accepted, and the articles continued to appear,
my only punishment being that the Century Company refused (when the volume came out) to publish the plans of certain
little-known but important gardens, such as those of the Villas Muti at Frascati and Gori at Siena, which I had taken
great pains to procure, because, according to the publishers, the public “did not care for plans.” I mention this
because, when “Italian Villas” became, as it soon did, a working manual for architectural students and landscape
gardeners, I was often reproached for not having provided the book with plans. In a sense, of course, the editors of
the “Century” were right. My articles were quite out of keeping with the Parrish pictures, which should have been used
to illustrate some fanciful tale of Lamotte–Fouque, Or Andersen’s “Improvisatore”; but I knew that, even had I had an
architectural draughtsman as illustrator, the editorial scruples would not have been allayed, for what really roused
them was not the lack of harmony between text and pictures but the fear their readers would be bored by the serious
technical treatment of a subject associated with moonlight and nightingales. Therefore, having been given the
opportunity to do a book that needed doing, I resolutely took it; and I hope the success of “Italian Villas,” which
still has a steady sale, has made the publishers forgive me.

Again and again in my literary life I have encountered the same kind of editorial timidity. I think it was Edwin
Godkin, then the masterly editor of the New York “Evening Post,” who said that the choice of articles published in
American magazines was entirely determined by the fear of scandalizing a non-existent clergyman in the Mississippi
Valley; and I made up my mind from the first that I would never sacrifice my literary conscience to this ghostly
censor. Not being obliged to live solely by my pen I thought I owed it to less lucky colleagues to fight for the
independence they might not always be in a position to assert. A higher standard of taste in letters can be achieved
only if authors will refuse to write down to the particular Mississippi Valley level of the day (for there is always a
censorship of the same sort, though it is now at the other end of the moral register), and the greatest service a
writer can render to letters is to follow his conscience.

In the intervals of my work on “Italian Villas” I had published a number of short articles which I collected and
brought out in 1905 in a volume called “Italian Backgrounds.” I do not intend to burden these pages with an account of
every book I have written and I speak of “Italian Backgrounds” only because it is a convenient peg on which to hang an
interesting discussion. In the ‘seventies and ‘eighties there had appeared a series of agreeable volumes of travel and
art-criticism of the cultured dilettante type, which had found thousands of eager readers. From Pater’s “Renaissance,”
and Symonds’ “Sketches in Italy and Greece,” to the deliciously desultory volumes of Vernon Lee, and Bourget’s delicate
“Sensations d’Italie,” though ranging through varying degrees of erudition, they all represented a high but
unspecialized standard of culture; all were in a sense the work of amateurs, and based on the assumption that it is
mainly to the cultured amateur that the creative artist must look for appreciation, and that such appreciation ought to
be, and often is, worth recording.

But while the cultivated reader continued to enjoy these books, and to ask for more, the voice of the trained
scholar was sounding a note of resistance. Literary “appreciations” of works of art were being smiled away by experts
trained in Bertillon–Morelli methods, and my deep contempt for picturesque books about architecture naturally made me
side with those who wished to banish sentiment from the study of painting and sculpture. Then, with the publication of
Berenson’s first volumes on Italian painting, lovers of Italy learned that aesthetic sensibility may be combined with
the sternest scientific accuracy, and I began to feel almost guilty for having read Pater and even Symonds with such
zest, and ashamed of having added my own facile vibrations to the chorus. The application of scholarly standards to the
judgment of works of art certainly helped to clear away the sentimental undergrowth which had sprung up in the wake of
the gifted amateur; but nowadays, as was almost certain to happen, the very critics who did the necessary clearing have
come to recognize that, their task once done, there remains the imponderable something, the very soul of the work
contemplated, and that this something may be felt and registered by certain cultivated sensibilities, whether or not
they have been disciplined by technical training. There remains a field of observation wherein the mere lover of beauty
can open the eyes and sharpen the hearing of the receptive traveller, as Pater, Symonds and Vernon Lee had done to
readers of my generation. The combination of gifts required is seldom found, and the volumes which guided my early
wanderings were succeeded by minor dithyrambs to which I never again felt tempted to add my own pipe of ecstasy; but
there is certainly room for the gifted amateur in the field of artistic impressions — if only he is sufficiently
gifted.